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Effects of maternal diet span more than one generation, new research finds

Undernourishment and high-fat diets lead to metabolic disruption and early sexual maturity

Deborah Sloboda, a professor of biomedical sciences at McMaster University, has done research that suggests that a mother who is unddernourished or has a diet too high in fat can cause problems for her children and grandchildren.

New research suggests a high-fat diet during pregnancy may be just as damaging to offspring as having an undernourished mother. And the effects span more than one generation.

A poor diet during pregnancy and lactation produces babies that are underweight at birth, prone to obesity later in life and tend to reach puberty early, according to Deborah Sloboda, a professor of biomedical sciences at McMaster University. She was speaking at this week’s conference on evolutionary medicine and childhood development at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby.

Because a female fetus already contains the follicle cells that will develop into eggs at sexual maturity — essentially the mother’s grandchildren — environmental stresses that affect the mother may be reprogramming the genes of her child and her child’s children at the same time, she said.

Sloboda’s lab is building on earlier research on women who were pregnant during wartime and later research using rats that found poor nutrition during pregnancy led to permanent changes in metabolism and led to early sexual maturity in offspring.

She has replicated these effects in the offspring of rat mothers fed either a high-fat or calorie-restricted diet. Offspring of both high-fat and calorie-restricted mothers had a lower metabolic rate and experienced early puberty compared to offspring of rats fed a normal diet during pregnancy.

The changes may be part of an adaptive response by the offspring to a challenging environment that begins in the womb called “fast life history” in which women living in deprivation reach sexual maturity early and have children much earlier than women in stable, resource-rich environments, she explained.

“In a place where there is high crime, fewer resources and poor socio-economic conditions, there may be a perception you won’t be around long and that unless you start to reproduce early you won’t have children,” she said.

British researcher David Nettle’s research found a relationship between deprivation in early childhood and early first pregnancy. Residential disruption, separation from the mother, lack of parental involvement, short duration of breastfeeding and low birth weight all contributed to early menstruation and teen pregnancy.

Difficult early childhood conditions appear to accelerate reproduction in all mammals. Sloboda suspects the process begins much earlier and that an offspring’s reproductive schedule and metabolic processes may be reprogrammed in the womb.

In rats, some of those effects appear to be amplified by the quality of the diet fed to the pups.

Undernourished pregnant rats gave birth to underweight pups that reached sexual maturity early, but when those pups were fed a high-fat diet, puberty came even earlier.

Pregnant rats fed a high-fat diet also gave birth to underweight pups, and those pups became overweight adults on a high-fat or a normal diet. The first generation female pups also reached puberty early and had irregular ovulation, effects that were passed down one additional generation, to their daughters.

“Pregnancy is the key vulnerable time point for these effects, diet during lactation mattered a lot less,” she said. “And, not surprisingly, there are transgenerational effects related to the maternal diet. This is not unlike what we have seen in studies of humans.”

Deborah Sloboda, a professor of biomedical sciences at McMaster University, has done research that suggests that a mother who is unddernourished or has a diet too high in fat can cause problems for her children and grandchildren.

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